India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged I could shoot, if he took no notice of me it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do. There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim.

  The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theater curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one should shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole; actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

  When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick—one never does when a shot goes home—but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time—it might have been five seconds, I dare say—he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upwards like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly toward me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

  I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open—I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

  In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were arriving with dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

  Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

  PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

  (1922–75)

  Pier Paolo Pasolini, who along with Fellini and Antonioni was one of the great film directors to have emerged from Italy in the post–World War II years, was also a writer of considerable talent; he is best known for his short stories. He went to India in 1961, accompanied by the novelists Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. Although attracted by socialism, Pasolini expressed in his films a profound ambivalence toward modern civilization. He was among many Italian intellectuals who felt alienated by the rapid postwar reconstruction and modernization of Italy. India seems to have intensified his feelings of distrust and scorn. Like many European travelers, he became obsessed with poverty and often saw little else but the physical wretchedness of the places he visited. He also brought his suspicion of the postwar Italian middle class to India. The following pages describe his vivid sense of the uncertainties of the semi-westernized Indian middle class.

  from THE SCENT OF INDIA

  It seemed like the face of San Sebastian: inclined a little toward one shoulder, the lips swollen and almost white, the eyes as if glazed with a frozen lament, and an upper lid drawn back and red. He was walking along the edge of a shady street on the periphery of Gwalior and, having noticed that I observed him for a moment, he now followed us with a sad smile.

  He was covered with the usual white rags: while around him, along that street on the periphery (if periphery and center have any meaning for Indian cities), the usual lugubrious misery, the usual shops little more than boxes, the usual little houses in ruins, the usual stores worn down by the breath of the monsoons, the usual high stench which smothers breathing. That smell of poor food and of corpses which in India is like a continuous powerful air current that gives one a kind of fever. And that odor which, little by little, becomes an almost living physical entity, seems to interrupt the normal course of life in the body of the Indians. Its breath, attacking those little bodies covered in their light and filthy linen, seems to corrode them, forcing itself to sprout, to reach a human embodiment.

  In that potent odor Muti Lal followed us humbly and anxiously. Every Indian is a beggar: even he who does not do it for a profession, if the occasion presents itself will not flinch from trying to extend his hand.

  Our hotel rose up at the bottom of an overgreen lawn, dusty, wearing the sinister solemnity of a cure resort.

  Moravia, having finished his little healthy walk which he had allowed himself in the midst of that “sea of rags,” without any hesitation reached the hotel, the desperate prospect ahead of that enormous room furnished with desolate furniture, with the grey mosquito net and the dead roaches in the bath.

  However I stopped at the entrance, on that peripheral road which had the aspect of a European street. I looked at Muti Lal, who was still smiling sadly, and exchanged a word with him. We introduced ourselves and he immediately told me everything about himself, as children do throughout the world. He came from Patyali in the province o
f Eata, where he had a family. He was working at Gwalior in a shop as a salesman. He was sleeping with some companions on the pavement. He was a Brahmin, as the associations of his name had already informed me. His skin was clear, almost white: and his features, a little unclear and delicate, were those of a bourgeois European boy. Indeed he knew how to read and write, and in fact he must also have attended a “high school”: he lit up completely when he knew that I was a journalist, he wanted to know the name of the newspaper where I wrote my articles on India: and he asked me anxiously if I would also write the “story” of our evening. He was therefore a bourgeois.

  It may have become clear that India has nothing mysterious about it, as the legends say. Basically one is dealing with a little country with only four or five big cities, of which one alone, Bombay, is worthy of the name; without industries, or almost; very uniform and with simple historical stratifications and crystallizations.

  In substance one is dealing with an enormous agricultural sub-proletariat, blocked for centuries in its institutions by a foreign domination which has made certain that these institutions were preserved while at the same time, through the fault of a conservation so consistent and unnatural, that they degenerated.

  In reality a country like India is easy to grasp intellectually. Although certainly one can go astray there, in the middle of this crowd of four hundred million souls: but one goes astray as in a rebus, in which one can arrive at the top with patience: the particulars are difficult, but not the substance.

  One of the most difficult “particulars” in this world is the middle class. Certainly we Italians have a model which at present vaguely approximates to the Indian one, if we think of our Southern middle class: recent formation, imitation of another type of middle class, psychological imbalance with strong contradictions, ranging from a stupid and cruel pride to a sincere understanding of the people's problems, etcetera.

  However in the Indian middle class there is something terribly uncertain, which gives one a sense of pity and of fear.

  Obviously we are dealing with a disproportion that is almost inhuman in relation to the reality in which it exists, in which live the enormous mass of the sub-proletarian who surround it like an ocean. It is true that the Indian middle class is born into that inferno: in those unformed and hungry cities, in those villas constructed with mud and the dung of cows, amidst famine and epidemic. Because of all this, it seems traumatized by it. It is rendered speechless or at least voiceless by it. The owners of the shops, and the rare professionals always have a terrified look, almost stupefied. In comparison to the Europeans, who are still a model that seems unreachable to them, they have almost lost their tongue.

  So they fix on family life, to which they give absolute priority: they are full of children whose gentility they cultivate: their own disturbed harmony is perpetuated in this tender model of children, and so the circle of gentility is closed, rather nastily and self-centeredly.

  Whatever the Indian middle class is I have seen it above all in Africa, in Kenya, where there are some tens of thousands of Indians (brought there by the English to construct the railroad when the Africans were still unusable), who have become the lower middle class of the place. They have become completely washed-out. Unsympathetic to the Africans, they cultivate this family gentility around the shop which gives them the ease or even a little wealth to do so: while underneath lingers the pain of not yet being Europeans.

  I remember that I was hurrying through the streets of Mombasa in a car when a silhouette crossed the street, unsure, risking being knocked down and my negro driver Ngomu hit his forehead with a finger, saying, as if one was talking of a habitual and natural topic: “Indian: stupid.”

  And another time I was walking through some little streets in Zanzibar at night, amidst piles of rubbish, and the two young negroes who were with me, Snani and Bwanatosha, said to me, with the same tone in their voice as they looked around: “Indian: dirty.”

  But it is not even accurate to speak of resignation and fatalism: because in the Indian middle class there is always a kind of anxiety, a sense of waiting, even if it is buried and useless.

  Muti Lal wanted to take me to the theater. We met each other after supper, having spent some hours in the desperate room on the ground floor of the national hotel, which seemed to be specially made for the entry of cobras; and we went together through the now dark big street, deserted but for its vague and terrible scent.

  We walked for a long time in between clusters of atrocious huts, little walls on fearsome meadows, and we arrived at a kind of fair: as usual, in the darkness and with the lights lit, everything appeared artificial, fantastic, worthy of Thousand and One Nights.

  We walked amongst the illuminated tents for a good long way, between crowds in cloaks and girdles, with turbans wound round the most beautiful hair, black and wavy, in the world, and we arrived at the theater.

  There was a large tent surrounded by a file of ragged people: some acting as guardians, others loitering and enjoying the music which floated violently, with frantic beatings of the drum, out of the tent.

  Muti Lal bought the tickets and we entered.

  One had to go down three or four steps of mud because the theater was a broad rectangle in fact scraped out of the yellow mud and covered over by the big tent.

  Fifty or so rows of improvised seats filled it: and one saw from close by the lined faces of the Indians with their rags and their turbans. It was cold and everyone was trembling, covered with their light linen and with only a scarf around their head. A long row of spectators was also squatting along the edge of the rectangular pit, against the tent.

  Some seats stood there on their own just below the stage, at least four to five meters from each other: they were the best places. Muti Lal happily guided me there, and I sat down between him and a bearded shopkeeper, who was already absorbed in the drama.

  The podium in front of the stage had not been formed by digging out the mud; since it was attached to the apron of the stage, with some improvised steps on the side made of yellow mud. The instrumentalists were gathered above there: they were playing a kind of pianola, a drum, and a wind instrument which made a deafening noise, accompanying and underlining the caressing, pathetic songs of the actors with unheard-of violence.

  The actors were all fat or well nourished: they were enacting, really, a drama of adventure with various coups de théâtre, with refindings, deposed kings, robbers and unhappy loves: but they were all as pink as piglets, with their full faces, their beautiful penguin thighs. The essence of virility was represented in the hero, by a pair of black whiskers which appeared to be false and that stood out proudly from his pink face.

  It didn't take me very long to notice that they were a disguise: beneath the white and red face one saw the black hair of his neck and his chest. The heroic and erotic idea of the Indians was one of white coloring, endowed with a respectable rotundity.

  In fact in all the little towns the advertisements for the cinema, depicted in a very simple and monotonous way, all represented endless processions of white protagonists with round cheeks and a little bit of a double chin.

  Now, all the Indians are minute, thin, with the little bodies of children: they are wonderful until twenty years old, gracious and full of pathos afterwards. How could such a monstrous ideal of beauty ever happen? What a difference between those stocky, puppyish heroes and my poor Muti Lal, sick, pallid, who was drinking, trembling with cold, the boiling tea, which another like him had offered him in some dirty cups.

  Thus I learnt to recognize a certain type of Indian bourgeois: which to be honest is still very rare. One finds him in some large hotel or in the little waiting rooms of airports. He is massive, corpulent, with hair which would have been beautiful, like that of almost all Indians, if a clever barber had not made it similar to two wings of a raven divided on the inclined skull: he has a fat wife, dressed in a splendid pink and yellow sari, the features balanced on round cheeks, and a little hair on the
upper lip: as well as a daughter clothed in the European style, curiously ugly, who laughs with the voice of a crackling gramophone.

  It is the middle class which, still very discreetly, hurries to occupy the place left by the deposed but still very rich Maharajas (these are totally sold out in any case: I have seen one of them with his little court at the Ritz, which is the best, albeit only nightspot for the rich of Bombay: he seemed like a faded puppet, dressed in the European style, surrounded by European women with whom he was dancing the waltz).

  In India the vigor possessed by that unpleasant institution called the Rotary Club is extraordinary. There was no hotel where we went (and the hotels of necessity had to be first class) where we did not find some people gathered for a cocktail. However they seemed to me reunions of the dead, who were embalmed with their beautiful flaring sari across them. I remember our arrival at Aurangabad, which was the first truly Indian town which we visited after Bombay. Before going to the hotel from the airport we wanted to pass through the center of the city, so voracious was our anxiety to look.

  It was already night. Things appeared and disappeared like visions, encapsulated in clusters of lights by the indescribably “eastern” atmosphere: a mussulman arch, like a relic in the middle of a sea of huts, laid out like hunched backs, with the little shops offering materials or colored foods, and in front of them the whirling crowd of people with light blue or red bandages on their heads, absurd clothes of an epoch light years away from ours, goats, cows, rickshaws… Along the edge of the central street (which was like a long vivisection, with the walls of the little houses of one story leaning entangled one against the other, each one with an illuminated and crowded little shop in front) ran the ditches of the drains which passed under the shops, which one entered over a small rounded step…Ob-serve the children who were collecting the dung of cows on the street, putting it into flat wide baskets… Observe the groups of young Mussulmans with their books under their arms… Observe a latrine, two high walls a half meter above the edge of the ditch, amongst which the Indians were urinating squatting, as is their habit… Observe the crows, always present throughout India with their purposeless scream…We crossed the entire city, which like all the Indian cities is only a big formless mass around a market. We left through another Mussulman archway and, across the country dotted with school buildings and barracks inherited from the English, we arrived at the hotel. This was a light construction of one story, most elegant, two long wings with the doors of the rooms giving onto a little portico, laid out in a large garden dotted with banjam trees and bougainvillea. As we entered into the little hall painted white with some little birds fluttering there freely, we didn't notice anything at first: but after an instant our attention was attracted by a crowd occupying this hall: gentlemen dressed in white and ladies in sari, all seated on some chairs laid out along the walls. Either they were silent or they were talking in a whisper. They were rich people, members of the Rotary Club in fact, perfectly inconceivable in the social circle which made up Aurangabad. After a few minutes they were eating at a very long table set out under the portico of one of the wings of the hotel, silent in the intense light which isolated them from the thick darkness of the country, one not without cobras, where thousands of miserable people were sleeping in their huts or on the rude earth, like a biblical dream.